![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
I need some second and third opinions from the [H]. (Not of my lack of a good backup either- I've heard enough of that crap on the homefront..)
I sent this question to LSI Sales- I'll post their response when I get it back from them.
A little background- I had a 9TB array on an Adaptec 51645 (6 x 2.0TB Western Digital RE4's in RAID5), and the card failed when I was expanding it to 7 drives.
So after spending the $$$$ for recovering the data on the array, I am going to try something different and with significantly higher performance and hopefully higher reliability than before. The kicker is I have "almost" everything on Backblaze (over 3TB- took something like 5 months to upload) except for after about November 5th or so. That was about when they announced that they would allow ISO's and a bunch of other files types.
So I changed my settings and added 450GB to the queue. And then my wife and I kept adding stuff (added to the end of the queue BTW) including her Master's and PhD research, 9 month old baby pictures, first crawling movies, documentation for my startup company, some critical corporate data- you get the idea; and I forgot about that change; "until later". The Adaptec card allows expansion of an array really easily, and woops- I didn't check my Backblaze status before I clicked fire. Sure enough, the card overheated and whigged out- destroying the array in the middle of a reconfiguration, and I do not have an optical backup for about 40 percent of our data, or a cloud backup of about 15 percent. Blueray burns will be starting back up soon!
Luckily, there is a good service for, get this- recovering a failed 7 drive RAID 5 9TB array that crashed in an erratic manner during an array reconfiguration from 6 to 7 drives- with a burned up RAID controller. It's expensive, but possible. Priceless compared to holiday (un)harmony.
The process is actually quite interesting; they just imaged each physical drive and are in the process of piecing together the pieces in a virtual environment. That is- piecing together the parity garbage of an incomplete array rebuild. http://24hourdata.com There is no charge if they are not successful.
I built the first array when I bought the T7500 from Dell about a year and a half ago- and am obviously shopping for a new controller card for my precious data, and a second card for "MAX IOPS" OS/Scratch. I always was thinking of drive failure, not controller failure as a critical problem. I never saw the controller card as as much of a problem- oops in hindsight.
I spent quite a bit of time talking with this data recovery engineer- and a lot of this is purely anecdotal evidence from what he see coming into his shop. The punch line was the Adaptec cards of late have a very bad reputation of failing (good to know now!) versus their models from 5-8 years ago; Promise and some other more affordable RAID controllers are apparently very unreliable. Some of the others are okay- and then you get into IBM and such which are truly enterprise class. The really only option right now is an LSI controller that uses an LSI developed and manufactured chipset; there is still quite a bit of abiguity of how much the 3Ware and LSI teams have merged. My experience with Dell PERC RAID cards confirmed his opinions- I have never had a single problem with any of them out of dozens; and they are almost wholly based on the LSI chipsets and designs from what I understand. He was very adamant about the LSI based cards being exceptionally reliable and none of the problems he sees typically have to do with those cards, rather than the drives or user error.
Some interesting documents from LSI on these new controllers I am looking at:
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/RAID Controllers/RAID Controllers Common Files/9265_9285_FAQ.pdf
http://.com/featured/lsi-9265-8i-me...-6805-raid-card-the-great-6gbs-raid-showdown/
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public...MR-SAS_9265-9285_Performance_Brief_022511.pdf
---
LSI:
I have a Dell T7500 (Xeon X5680) workstation that we are trying to max out on IOPS.
I have 12 x OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 120GB drives (SATA III / 6Gbps w/ TRIM) and 2 Thermaltake MAX-1562 racks with SAS/SATA backplanes (6 x discreet connectors each in a 5.25" drive bay configuration).
I would like to use your MegaRAID 9265-8i for this RAID array.
1) Is the 9265-8i the same chipset and cache as the 9285-8e? There is some confusion in your comparison documentation.
2) Does this card use an LSI developed chipset, or is it 3Ware (or other) derived? We have had some problems with other manufacturers and want to be sure to get genuine LSI hardware. And we are not sure at what level 3Ware and LSI's technology had interleaved so far.
3) The backplane we are using has 6 discreet ports (we also have 2 of them). The controller has 2 x 4-port multilane ports. The controller supports up to 128 devices (SSD's in this case). What is the recommended method and products for getting these 8 cables out of the controller to 12 drives with discreet connectors in 2 internal 5.25" enclosures?
4) I also have a 9280-16i4e in this machine. What software upgrades do you recommend for the 12xSSD on 9265 Array; and the 7x Western Digital RE4 2.0TB drives in RAID 5 on 9280 Array?
5) We will have plenty of storage with this 9265 / SSD array. What RAID configuration (with redundancy- i.e. no RAID0) would you recommend with this hardware for max IOPS? Is there any advantage other than double parity for a RAID 6 array?
Thanks!
Jonathan
I sent this question to LSI Sales- I'll post their response when I get it back from them.
A little background- I had a 9TB array on an Adaptec 51645 (6 x 2.0TB Western Digital RE4's in RAID5), and the card failed when I was expanding it to 7 drives.
So after spending the $$$$ for recovering the data on the array, I am going to try something different and with significantly higher performance and hopefully higher reliability than before. The kicker is I have "almost" everything on Backblaze (over 3TB- took something like 5 months to upload) except for after about November 5th or so. That was about when they announced that they would allow ISO's and a bunch of other files types.
So I changed my settings and added 450GB to the queue. And then my wife and I kept adding stuff (added to the end of the queue BTW) including her Master's and PhD research, 9 month old baby pictures, first crawling movies, documentation for my startup company, some critical corporate data- you get the idea; and I forgot about that change; "until later". The Adaptec card allows expansion of an array really easily, and woops- I didn't check my Backblaze status before I clicked fire. Sure enough, the card overheated and whigged out- destroying the array in the middle of a reconfiguration, and I do not have an optical backup for about 40 percent of our data, or a cloud backup of about 15 percent. Blueray burns will be starting back up soon!
Luckily, there is a good service for, get this- recovering a failed 7 drive RAID 5 9TB array that crashed in an erratic manner during an array reconfiguration from 6 to 7 drives- with a burned up RAID controller. It's expensive, but possible. Priceless compared to holiday (un)harmony.
The process is actually quite interesting; they just imaged each physical drive and are in the process of piecing together the pieces in a virtual environment. That is- piecing together the parity garbage of an incomplete array rebuild. http://24hourdata.com There is no charge if they are not successful.
I built the first array when I bought the T7500 from Dell about a year and a half ago- and am obviously shopping for a new controller card for my precious data, and a second card for "MAX IOPS" OS/Scratch. I always was thinking of drive failure, not controller failure as a critical problem. I never saw the controller card as as much of a problem- oops in hindsight.
I spent quite a bit of time talking with this data recovery engineer- and a lot of this is purely anecdotal evidence from what he see coming into his shop. The punch line was the Adaptec cards of late have a very bad reputation of failing (good to know now!) versus their models from 5-8 years ago; Promise and some other more affordable RAID controllers are apparently very unreliable. Some of the others are okay- and then you get into IBM and such which are truly enterprise class. The really only option right now is an LSI controller that uses an LSI developed and manufactured chipset; there is still quite a bit of abiguity of how much the 3Ware and LSI teams have merged. My experience with Dell PERC RAID cards confirmed his opinions- I have never had a single problem with any of them out of dozens; and they are almost wholly based on the LSI chipsets and designs from what I understand. He was very adamant about the LSI based cards being exceptionally reliable and none of the problems he sees typically have to do with those cards, rather than the drives or user error.
Some interesting documents from LSI on these new controllers I am looking at:
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/RAID Controllers/RAID Controllers Common Files/9265_9285_FAQ.pdf
http://.com/featured/lsi-9265-8i-me...-6805-raid-card-the-great-6gbs-raid-showdown/
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public...MR-SAS_9265-9285_Performance_Brief_022511.pdf
---
LSI:
I have a Dell T7500 (Xeon X5680) workstation that we are trying to max out on IOPS.
I have 12 x OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 120GB drives (SATA III / 6Gbps w/ TRIM) and 2 Thermaltake MAX-1562 racks with SAS/SATA backplanes (6 x discreet connectors each in a 5.25" drive bay configuration).
I would like to use your MegaRAID 9265-8i for this RAID array.
1) Is the 9265-8i the same chipset and cache as the 9285-8e? There is some confusion in your comparison documentation.
2) Does this card use an LSI developed chipset, or is it 3Ware (or other) derived? We have had some problems with other manufacturers and want to be sure to get genuine LSI hardware. And we are not sure at what level 3Ware and LSI's technology had interleaved so far.
3) The backplane we are using has 6 discreet ports (we also have 2 of them). The controller has 2 x 4-port multilane ports. The controller supports up to 128 devices (SSD's in this case). What is the recommended method and products for getting these 8 cables out of the controller to 12 drives with discreet connectors in 2 internal 5.25" enclosures?
4) I also have a 9280-16i4e in this machine. What software upgrades do you recommend for the 12xSSD on 9265 Array; and the 7x Western Digital RE4 2.0TB drives in RAID 5 on 9280 Array?
5) We will have plenty of storage with this 9265 / SSD array. What RAID configuration (with redundancy- i.e. no RAID0) would you recommend with this hardware for max IOPS? Is there any advantage other than double parity for a RAID 6 array?
Thanks!
Jonathan
